The COMPLETE WOMEN'S Fasting Guide For LONGEVITY & Balancing Hormones | Dr. Mindy Pelz

we are hormone illiterate it's really the lack of knowledge that has Us in the place that we are at as far as Women's Health gets it's really an unusual framework to think about managing hormones with fasting I think I think I sort of love to hear your perspective on that you've learned and how it works yeah I love this question because what I just sort of

stumbled into understanding fasting for women because this was about over 10 years ago when we saw Dr osumi's work come out into the world talking about this concept of autophagy we started to see this big wave of people fasting and all of the people you know so many people were getting incredible results and I always call them o matters they became like the one meal a

dayers that are like I'm just gonna eat one meal a day and I'm gonna do that forever and I was actually out I have a popular YouTube channel and I was educating people on the science behind fasting and I started to see that there was a really clear difference between the way women the results women were getting and the results men were getting and when I

started to dive into that a little deeper I realized that women got great results at certain points of their cycle but if they continued to do one meal a day over and over and over again they actually destroyed their hormones and they started yeah they started losing their hair they started having menstrual problems that were pretty severe if you were in perimenopause and you weren't paying

attention to where to fast all of a sudden you started to see women that were going into menopause way too early so what I started doing is tweaking and looking at okay if I look at estrogen I look at progesterone they have vastly different requirements estrogen likes to have glucose below estrogen likes insulin to be low progesterone we actually need to bring glucose up we need

to bring have we go into more of an insulin resistant State the week before our periods so I started timing like different fasts and different foods to cater to these two hormones and what I saw was not only in my clinic myself but now it's been millions of women on my YouTube channel is that it just balanced their Cycles out completely and it was everything from

PCOS to perimenopause symptoms to infertility we started to see if just those two hormones if women just looked at those two hormones and used fasting in the right place of the cycle they started to see all of their hormones balance out mm-hmm interesting and how and how do you how would you how would you sort of manage someone throughout that process yeah so the in the

I wrote something in the the current book I wrote something called the uh fasting cycle and it was actually something I created for my patients because I was trying to show them hey you know the first 10 days you can lean into some longer fasts and uh when we hit ovulation we're going to want to shorten our fast because you have so many uh hormones coming

in when you come out of ovulation you can go into some longer fast and then the week before you want to stop fasting so it really became working with a woman's lifestyle and teaching her you know a are you tracking your cycle so it's interesting because a lot of the younger generation is doing this uh my son is right yeah exactly my son's 20 my daughter's

23 and they know this that you know my son's like oh yeah all my friends track it my daughter's tracking it but ask a 43 year old woman and she's like oh I'm supposed to track my cycle so there's a little bit of a generational Gap there um but you gotta you got to start tracking and you got to know what hormones are coming in when

and then you got to know what these personalities of these hormones are so it's really getting into the Nuance of what's happening at different parts of your cycle and helping women understand the lifestyle to Pat to pair to that that's how we started that's how we start to repair it's not going to be in a fancy you know supplement it's not going to be in a

in us you know beating the the conversation to the ground about HRT it's going to be what are we doing for these women's lifestyle so that they can match their lifestyle to their hormonal needs incredible and then how does fasting work to regulate hormones I mean what is the mechanism of action how does it actually do that well okay so if we start and we look

at what happens I think this is the best question is what happens when we fast so the way that I look at fasting is that you it's you have two Energy Systems one that comes from sugar and one that comes from fat and so when we learn how to metabolically switch into this fat burning Energy System we are not just making what we call ketones and

I know there's been a you know a lot of great discussion about the healing power of ketones but we start to see many healing aspects exist within this fat burning system so the longer that you're in a fasted State the more healing mechanisms show up so for example we can see testosterone Rays we only have this is another huge elephant in the hormonal room which is

we have a lot of studies on men we have a lot of studies on men and women we don't have a lot of studies on women alone so but when we look at testosterone in a man when he fasts 13 to 15 hours he can raise testosterone by 1300 percent he goes to 20 to 24 hours he gets that testosterone level up to around 2 000

according to the science a woman it's going to take it's going to take her 24 hours to even start to see a little blip of increase in testosterone but what we do appear to know is that it starts to rise about 24 hours so now can we teach her how to start to train her body maybe one day a week maybe one day a month to

start to move into some longer fast to get testosterone coming up the the other thing that we see is that when we start to stimulate autophagy which comes in around 7 17 hours well what autophagy is is it's where that intelligence goes within the cell and it starts to repair the cell well guess what's very very susceptible and highly influenced by autophagy is your hypothalamus and

pituitary and the ovaries so now can we teach a woman how to dip into a little bit of a longer fast so she can start to clean up these areas that might be packed with toxins so they're like you know each i i in the book I write six different uh six different length fasts and each one has a hormonal impact but that sort of gives

you a big picture of why we can use it therapeutically I'm not talking about this as a fad diet I'm talking about this as a therapy tool that everybody can afford to do interesting and so what what is the different types of fasting and how how do they age differ yeah so uh the six different ones that I lay out are intermittent fasting which is 13

to 15 hours and and just so we're clear fasting to me is time restriction it's not calorie restriction so and we can talk about what to eat in your fasting window which I'm I'm sure you've you've talked about at nauseam but when we look at 13 to 15 hours that's where we start to see growth hormone we start to see that the body brings down glucose

and Insulin we see that the body starts to make ketones you know autophagy fasting is 17 hours I mentioned that where it starts to the cells start to clean themselves up toxins get get pushed out of the cell 24 hours of fasting we start to see that actually the whole gut microbiome repairs which this is also key because estrogen is broken down by a set of

bacteria in the gut called the estrobolome and so we actually have bacteria that needs the help and of of something like a fasted state to start start to thrive so we can break estrogen down when we look at like 36 hours the research is showing that you can start to tap into more fat burning 48 hours we get the whole dopamine system starts to reboot and

then Walter Longo brought us the 72-hour fast which is really resetting your whole immune system so each one of those pieces has a different implication for both men and women but especially for women so so you know fast up to 70 cars are a long time how do those work that are different than just let's say time restricted eating where you're eating within an eight-hour window

yeah so 72 would be literally going without food for for 72 hours so you're you're staying in that fat burner state for 72 hours so as daunting as that sounds I've seen some of the greatest healing happen to people I don't have you ever done a three-day water fast I have I have yeah what'd you notice I mean it was hard I was hungry but then

you know after the first companies I got really clear energetic felt light uh you know it was quite a it was quite a liberating experience to sort of Disconnect from food yeah and and Insight a lot of people get a lot of great spiritual Insight because the brain calms down so well yeah it's a method of spiritual Quest often is fasting right prolonged fast longer fast

has been used forever yeah so so you know the 72 is you know you're not gonna a woman's may be doing gonna do that once a year um you know one of the things that we know and I'm sure you you know you've studied this and looked at this especially in relation to your new book um but a 72-hour fast is going to get rid of

senescent cells um those aging cells and so it wipes out the cells that are slow in the process down slowing that if speeding the aging process up but making the body more uh not only insulin resistant but hormone resistant sometimes vitamin D resistant which is really important for hormonal health so we we can look at a 72-hour fast is again therapeutic we could dip into it

to get rid of the cells that are no longer serving us how often should someone do something like that so two you know again it's it's Prince but I twice a year is a great opportunity to get rid of the cells that no longer serve you and reboot your immune system I personally recommend my community that we do it January and September and largely because January

is when we come out of the holidays everybody's overdone it and then September you know if if you if you're living in in our hemisphere you know summer now we're we're we've overdo it in summer so it's a great it's a really good reset to just make sure that you didn't far you know Veer too far off your your your health habits and for me for

example I'm scared about doing a 72 hour fast again because I'm like 10 body fat I'll lose weight very fast even if I don't eat enough in a day I'll I'll lose weight in a day I probably shouldn't say that in public but I'll get death threats in my my house but uh I mean I concerned about someone like me is it still useful uh is

there harm will I lose too much muscle uh how do I prevent that you know what are the downsides conversation that I don't think we're having enough so when you're in the fasted State all of this healing is happening and so part of that is a breakdown of muscle there's a lot of studies that show you know your muscle shrinks while you're fasting but guess what

your muscles breaking down when you're lifting weights too so you're you're when we exercise certain ways we are breaking muscle down and we know that we're breaking it down so that we can build it stronger so when we look at the fasted state where we there may be a small amount of breaking muscle down to because the body is going to go find glucose where it

needs to find it and if you don't have a lot of fat it's going to find it in the liver and it's going to find it in the muscles but here's the really cool opportunity is that what you when you reintroduce food that is going to actually be a game changer for building muscle we've seen it be a game changer for the microbiome so you would

want to come in and it depends on the length fast you would do but let's say you do a 72 hour fast and you're like wow my gosh my muscles have completely shrunk that is completely temporary and if you come in with something like protein cycling where every couple hours you are doing 30 grams of protein or more you're actually going to build up mtor and

you're going to start to see that those muscles start to actually grow stronger same thing happens with the microbiome yeah we see like total change in the microbiome that looks like the good and the bad bacteria start to go away in a fasted state but when we reintroduce food if we start to bring in the polyphenol the probiotic the Prebiotic Foods now we're actually are starting

to regrow that microbiome to a whole new level so it's so to answer your question the answer is absolutely and you're going to really need to be mindful of what you break that fast with because when you reintroduce food you have an opportunity to take your health to a whole new level so essentially it's the refeeding process that activates all the sort of rebound benefit so

yes you will have a loss of certain things like muscle perhaps but you'll also cleaned out all these senescent cells this deep cleaning so the deep cleaning you're talking about is about killing the zombie cells which are these one of the Hallmarks of Aging which produce these secretory inflammatory products that are spewing them out all over the body and accelerating Aging in every possible way are

they are other benefits besides the autophagy and the killing of the senesis cells that happen with a prolonged fast versus like an eight hour a Time window every day of eating like a daily time restricted eating yeah so you know Walter Longo brought us the the whole resetting of the white blood cells you know his original research was looking at Patients going through chemotherapy and found

that it just it decimated the immune system um and so but what he saw it was after like at that 72 hour mark it got rid of the bad bad white blood cells and fresh new ones regrow and it re-stimulated the whole immune system so we also have evidence that the dopamine system gets completely rebooted at about 48 hours so new dopamine receptor sites will actually

be will emerge so now when you enter back into food you're going to start to enjoy your food a little more interesting right each one of these has like a different healing mechanism and when you pair that with good food and now you've created the two amazing healing states without again anything other than using your own body as a tool for healing that's amazing so you

you actually um you know accelerate your immune function and you create a reset of your dopamine receptors now dopamine for those people are listening is you know the sort of the pleasure molecule that's what we eat sugar for or smoke or drink or take cocaine or heroin if we're unlucky and those are the things that activate these pleasure sensors and they become saturated and so we

need more and more stimulation to achieve the same benefits so if you haven't eaten sugar for a month and then you have you know a bowl of ice cream or a cookie or something sweet it it's going to be like having a big you know intravenous hit of cocaine and you're just gonna go whoa but if you're if you're eating it all the time you need

more and more just like an alcoholic needs a lot more alcohol I can drink one glass of wine and I'm a little tipsy other people who are heavy drinkers may need a half a bottle of whiskey to get the same benefit I mean benefit which is not the same benefit so I think I think this is really fascinating so so both shorter term timer should be

eating and longer periods of fasting you recommend not just um not just a sort of daily time restricting and should we do this every day should we do time restricted eating every day and eat only in an eight hour window or ten hour window like what's the optimal dose um for for doing this yeah uh before I answer that question I want to go back to

one interesting comment about the alcoholic and and the and the drug addicted person so one of the things we know about people who are obese is that they're not getting the same pleasure out of food um as somebody who's more dopamine sensitive their dopamine receptor sites get saturated and so now they they are not they have to eat more food to get the same pleasure and

it be it's just like the alcoholic has to keep drinking more and more to get the same dopamine response so what I loved about that 48-hour fast and why we do it as a community so much is that it resets that system so now you're getting more pleasure from your food you're not needing as much because you're feeling the dopamine effects much quicker so so I

just want to point that out because I think that's something that's just not talked about enough um as far as frequencies so you know for my this is the the big part of fast like a girl is that I want um women to move in and out of different fasts according to their menstrual cycle using those six different fasts as as their tool of you know

they can do anything from 13 to 72 depending on what they're trying to accomplish with their bodies um for men uh and for post-menopausal women I think same thing but in a weekly amount we want to move in and out of different Lanes fast so I'll give you an example I recommend what I call a 5-1-1 where five days a week you're intermittent fasting super easy

one day a week you want to push that fast just just make it a little uncomfortable you know there's a thing called as you know I'm pushing it it depends if you want to repair yeah if you want to repair your gut you're going to go to like 24 hours so you can get that gut reset if you want to detox and get rid of some

senescent cells then make sure you get at least to 17 hours if you want to get burn some more fat try going 36 hours so it really depends on what you're gonna do and then one day a week don't fast you know go go skip the fasting and and actually Feast so when you go back and you look at our Primal ancestors they they were Feast

fam and cycling there we go long periods without food and then they'd Feast once they made a big kill so we're so far from that now and that's why the variation is getting us back to how we're genetically designed and and like our Primal ancestors yeah that's true I remember I remember being an African safari and we were out there a number of times in the

same area there was this one big lion it was a male lion and he just looked so emaciated and skinny like he said it was terrible and then like the next day we saw him and he like like he looked like he was nine months pregnant and he literally probably killed something and ate the entire thing so it's that fasting and that sort of feasting cycle

um that you know we do but is it good to Feast like that or like how do you kind of re-enter food because I think it's important not just to kind of like you said you how do you reintroduce protein what are you eating are you eating like you know two grams of protein per kilo a day or more when you reintroduce food how do you

how do you manage that so in the book I mapped out what I call um or I mapped out three different ways we should be reintroducing food so that we can get the healing effect to continue and it sort of stops that desire to just keep eating so the three different ways are and you can combine all three of these they don't have to be in

silos so one is fat you want to make sure you have a lot of good fat that's going to kill the hunger hormone so like an avocado one of my favorite things to break a fast with is like a big avocado and then I'll throw some sauerkraut on it put some nuts some seeds and you're pretty you're pretty satiated after that or like a you know

a big salad with all of that on there so if we use fat as like a break for the desire to eat you're not going to go Boomerang as much but as you know it's got to be good fat then we can look at protein in protein I'm sure you've had this conversation on on your podcast but it is a conversation that needs to continue which

is we're just not giving protein enough credit and what most people especially my menopausal women out there I just want to emphasize that when you are eating protein it's another way of building muscle especially if you're getting at least 30 grams but what protein also does is it it creates the more muscle you have the more insulin receptor sites you're going to have so now you're

going to be more insulin sensitive so make sure you're you're you're going big on protein and then the third one is what I call the three p's and this is polyphenol probiotic and Prebiotic Foods so get repair your microbiome get the green leafy vegetables in get the nuts and the seeds and if you want to combine all those together in one meal fabulous I promise you

you're not going to be hungry after that because this is good quality therapeutic food that is going to make sure that that hunger hormone stops and the healing continues and and are there people who shouldn't be fasting or who shouldn't do this yeah so and it's a great question so the the first group that I always say is if you have an eating disorder you need

to be really coached uh through fasting you don't want to go down that journey by yourself so if you have a psychologist or a doctor that that can work with you fabulous um so just be mindful that it doesn't trigger any any old patterns for you the second group um that I really can't emphasize enough is pregnancy this is not your tool this is not the

the tool that you want to use you can you can support a healthy microbiome there's a lot of other great tools while you're pregnant eat more protein fasting's not your tool and then the third one is the nursing the nursing mom I just don't want her fasting longer than 15 hours because the minute she goes into autophagy now what's going to happen is she's going to

start to see some of these um you know we talked about the senescent cells that are dying off but there's another process called apoptosis where you're going to see dysfunctional cells that are packed with heavy metals and toxins they're going to die off and go directly into her breast milk so how do you deal with sort of like the detoxification process that happens with fasting because

you know as a physician I you know we're aware of the biological aspects of detoxification the requirement for nutrients for phase one and phase two detoxification the need for fiber for elimination the the need for amino acids for a lot of the phase two Pathways of detoxification so how do you sort of navigate that because I always wonder about what happens when you just eat nothing

and is that is that a stress that you're not actually taken care of by actually providing the raw materials for your body to process everything that gets metabolized everything that gets released from your fat tissues all the toxins you're exposed to that then get actually activated while you're fasting how do you address that yeah it's such a another great point and what what I really am

trying to get people to understand both men and women is that you got to make sure your detox pathways are open so this is making sure that the lymph that's that's pulling the toxins out of your your or internal organs are completely open so you know this is where the dry brushing this is where um the infrared saunas this is where it's just sweating in general

this is where the breath work all of that comes into play making sure you have bowel movements while you're you know fasting which is fascinating if you've ever like a three-day water fast we'll see people still having bowel movements the third day because they're just yeah all their body's just getting rid of everything so so just using some of those those natural ways to detoxify and

opening up those Pathways will make it so that when the body goes into that detox date it can do it really efficiently interesting and so basically making sure you're drinking plenty of fluids that you're actually not you don't need the you're saying sweating and dry brushing you don't need to take the nutrients you don't need to take the amino acids you don't need to take all

the cofactors for detoxification is what you're saying yeah I mean you can so let's talk about that because there are certain things that you can have in your fasting window and one of them is minerals I really recommend that a lot of people especially when they go into the longer fast um that they've got some sodium magnesium potassium in in some water and they're just so

electrolytes electrolytes yeah and then we and then aminos so so here's here's a really interesting thing on aminos aminos can really help make fasting a lot easier so to your point they support the detox Pathways and they make those symptoms that can show up that are really uncomfortable they can make them a lot better but here's the question that nobody's been able to answer and I

don't I just don't think we have any science on it is what we know stops autophagy is 20 grams of protein or more so if you're going to do aminos is that going to stop autophagy it won't stop ketosis but is it going to stop autophagy and that's the million dollar question I haven't seen anybody be able to answer any research on it so having said

that I'm a huge fan of minerals and aminos in your fasting window yeah that's interesting I think that's always the thing I I wondered about and worried about you know years ago I I you know I was working at Canyon Ranch as a medical director and they're pretty much still anywhere between 40 or maybe late 30s and like early 60s and that was the majority of

our guests and clients and patients and so I got to be a very experienced in dealing with all sorts of hormonal problems that were being poorly treated or actually mistreated by the conventional medical system and it was just striking to me how you know the answer for everything before the menopause was take the birth control pill and they answered everything after it was take hormone replacement

therapy and then and then of course uh the data came out that hormone replacement therapy permanent Provera specifically which are not human hormones they're one is a horse hormone and one is a synthetic progesterone it ended up having more serious consequences for women who took them like heart attacks and strokes and cancer and so you know everybody overnight boom 50 million women stopped taking hormones which

created a huge catastrophe for them with no answers in sight and here we are gosh that was 98 so uh you know over 25 years later still women are struggling and trying to figure it out and doctors are confused so I I wrote an article years ago called the life cycles of women talking about how to use a functional medicine approach to address women throughout their

life cycle and and the issues that they're suffering from that they really don't need to that are I would say optional if you know what to do so talk about how you know you have focused on this why why this is such an important area to get clear for women and and and how we really had it wrong and what we need to do to figure

out how to get it right oh wow that's that's a loaded question there's a lot in that so um let me start with the first part of that question um the biggest challenge we have right now with hormones is that we are hormone illiterate so this is women this is doctors this is men like we just don't understand our hormones both men and women but for

women this is a massive problem because our hormones run and regulate everything from our menstrual cycle obviously but also our appetite our moods our sleep everything is driven through hormones in fact when you actually look at the word hormone it it comes from the Greek word meaning to excite it actually is what will initiate chemical reactions within the cells so you have to have your hormones

in balance in order for your cells to do the job they were meant to do but when we look at the collective societal way that we approach female Health nobody's being taught how to live a life that works with these hormones so my passion started when I started seeing my own patients suffering with perimenopause and menopause I started having my own experiences and to your point

when you opened up this conversation there was really only one solution well there was two and that was don't do hormone replacement it's very scary and take the birth control pill but there was no education about what our hormones were and what lifestyle we should be using to match to the hormonal fluctuations that happen to us not only monthly but also throughout our lifetime so it's

really the lack of knowledge that has Us in the place that we are at as far as Women's Health goes yeah I like that concept of hormone illiteracy because I really think it's true I I just am shocked at how even endocrine experts you know they know what they know about what they know but in terms of how do we impact hormones without using drugs it's

kind of like what you know and and I I think it's really one of the most gratifying parts of my practice and a functional medicine is seeing the power to transform women's lives from painful periods from heavy periods from irregular periods from PMS from fibroids from infertility from perimenopause for menopausal symptoms all of it sexual dysfunction libido issues weight metabolism changes all these things are not

inevitable parts of being a woman and I think about it you know I I thought you know jokes of 75 of women have some form of PMS like was that just a design flaw or or something actually going on here that we can address and get rid of it yeah so on that note you bring up such a good point there are two major issues that

are going on for women one is this A literacy problem like I can't tell you how many women that I've talked to that don't even understand when estrogen comes in during their cycle when progesterone most women don't know that they get testosterone in a big way only at one whole point of their whole cycle so we have this lack of knowledge not only with women but

doctors like you said as well but then we are in an evolutionary mismatch with our hormones so we have more physical stressors emotional stressors chemical stressors the world is packed as you know with uh endocrine disruptors and so the hormonal problems are getting bigger and bigger and bigger because the world is getting more and more toxic not just from a chemical level but from an emotional

level and then we don't we don't understand ourselves so we have this mismatch that's happening and it's creating this hot mess for women so to talk about this talk about why are women's hormones so screwed up and by the way men's are too I see like 20 and 30 year olds with testosterone levels of like 80 year olds and I'm like what is going on here

but a lot of it's due to poor metabolic health so let's talk about women because it's a little more complicated women it's not just about you know bad diet it's about a lot of things that are influencing their hormone function well I mean each each hormone is going to have a different thing that's messing it up is the way that I look at it so I

think the best place to start this conversation is to realize that men are really driven by one hormone which is testosterone and testosterone you know is made in the outer layer of the testes goes up to the brain and converts to estrogen women we've got testosterone progesterone and estrogen made in not just the ovaries but the adrenals and some of the peripheral tissues so we have

to really address different Lifestyles when we're looking at these different hormones so when we look at why women are struggling right now a large part of that is there's a one-size-fits-all approach to health care I walk into my doctor's office I have high cholesterol I have high glucose or high insulin and we're never asked what part of our cycle we're at so so we have we

have a real challenge just being able to get medical care that can bring in this hormonal picture so more women are suffering I don't know if you saw the New York Times article on menopause recently but one of one of the things that really stood out to me is that there was this line where they said that we have a societal acceptance of women suffering with

their health yes a hundred percent a hundred percent I'm like you don't need to suffer absolutely so so we you know woman when she's suffering goes into the doctor's office and there's a there they're given a one-size-fits-all approach so so we have that issue the second issue we have and this is a big part of what I'm trying to teach women is that when you look

at your menstrual cycle estrogen has vastly different qualities and lifestyle habits she wants us to live by and whereas progesterone completely wants us to do something different so let's just use cortisol as an example estrogen is pretty forgiving of cortisol if you decide to run a marathon or do a really long fast when estrogen is coming in it's not going to really affect estrogen too much

but progesterone that comes in the week before your period it it does not like when cortisol shows up when cortisol goes High progesterone goes shy like she's out she's not gonna make her appearance so then we start to see women losing their periods and then or having really difficult periods once they start because of the lack of progesterone and that's just that's just cortisol alone we

can do the same thing with glucose insulin I mean you can take you can take exercise we should be exercising according to our cycle but we have to look at these three hormones through the lens of our lifestyle to get them back in balance hmm yeah it's so important and you know I think there's a lot of other things that affect women's hormones too obviously the

stress sugar in our diet alcohol environmental toxins um sedentary lifestyles all these things affect our hormonal balance and there are things that we can usually do something about toxins in the environment we can reduce our exposure it's a little harder but pretty much everything else whether it's smoking or caffeine or alcohol or sugar or how we manage stress or sleep all these are things that are

within our control and I've seen so many patients just recover from you know years and years of misery and thought they just had to live with PMS or I thought they had to live with all these menopausal symptoms and you know it's important to realize that you actually can can fix it how do we decide you know when it when you need to use hormone therapy

what ways that we can use lifestyle that actually works better than hormone therapy whether it's the pill pre-menopausal or hormone replacement after you know what what are the things you're finding as you're as you're helping women through this process of regulating their hormonal dysfunction with with food and lifestyle so My Philosophy is always lifestyle first do lifestyle clean up your lifestyle and then see if you

need the medication or you need the hormone therapy so that's the my Approach now what what is a big uh challenge that we have right now is that I strongly feel as our hormones start to decline around the age of 40 that our lifestyle has to dramatically change and this is another piece of Education that's not getting out to the world and so there are five

things that I recommend women over 40 start to do fasting is one and psych cycling their fast going in and out of high carb low carb and and um and making sure that yeah so going into low carbs so we can balance estrogen and then going into higher carbs so we can keep the thyroid happy and we can keep progesterone happy and then making sure you're

eating enough protein for sure and then the third one is you gotta most women when they get into their 40s they've got to repair their microbiome they've been on birth control for decades they've been on multiple rounds of antibiotics and steroid use their microbiome is in bad shape and you need that as you move into those perimenopause and menopausal years and then you mentioned it detox

is another one we gotta start teaching women how to look at all their their beauty products and what what are they doing for detox in general and then the last one is what was actually a phrase coined by uh Dr Libby Weaver and it's called rushing woman syndrome we gotta we gotta bring in more mindfulness tools we've got to learn how to chill out a little

bit more and so we we got to start with those five steps first and then if that's not course correcting now you can go in with more success whether you choose bioidenticals or hormone replacement it's up to you but we've got to to stop looking at those tools as being this I'm going to absolutely do it or I'm not gonna do it because as we go

disorders from you know menstrual issues PMS heavy bleeding painful periods cramping uh to really more serious issues like fibroids and infertility and PCOS and it's just amazing when you start to apply these principles that a lot of women out there who struggle with these issues can get better and and not using hormonal therapy right right and and I know this is like a hot debate right

now especially you know amongst women's uh Health groups is really this idea of should I do hormone replacement should I not I know we're looking at it a little different um but what we have to realize about hormones is that there is the production of a hormone then there is the breakdown of a hormone and then there's the hormone being able to get into the cell

so if all you're doing is focusing on the production of a hormone through through a medication or through a hormone therapy you're still got to have a good microbiome to be able to break that down you still got to have a great functioning liver to break it down and you got to still detox so that hormone can get into the cell so this is why I

I you know doesn't matter if you're going to do it or not do it it's a personal choice but those five steps have to be considered otherwise you're going to end up in one of those situations where you're like I took it it's not working you're gonna and women as women unfortunately what we do is we start thinking it's our problem it's our fault we did

something wrong and that has to stop as well totally amazing um so you know where do women start how do they start thinking about working on this for themselves how do they begin to begin a strategy what are the steps they should take you know you have this five-step program kind of walk us through what it would look like yeah it's so like it depends on

you so this is the other a complicated thing about talking about women's hormones is that we've got women that are in their fertile years you know the 20s 30s teens 20s 30s we've got the perimenopausal years the 40s and then we have the post-menopausal so the first is you got to know where you are and what your hormones are doing if you have a cycle make

sure that you you're tracking your cycle I'm also a huge fan of of a urinary hormone test so that you know where your hormones are at I highly recommend that because then you know what you need to work on and you and you can get to know these this is why I call them the personalities like we got to get to know the personalities of these

hormones and when they're showing up like progesterone is going to make you really hungry and crave carbs and and estrogen estrogen is going to make you very verbal and want to go out and you know and and put your party hat on and be out you know socializing all night long and and testosterone is going to spike your libido and increase your motivation and drive so

get to know these per personalities because they're coming in and out every single day once you once you know that now how do you pair your lifestyle and this is the five steps that I wrote I actually wrote that in a book called The menopause reset um and so that's that was my book before fast like a girl it's all written out there but start to

take these five steps and ask yourself am I fasting am I varying my Foods am I working on my microbiome am I detoxing and I'm am I slowing down start there I mean that's that could be a decade that could be a long time working on that um and then from there you can start to figure out do I need to supplement do I need to

Med use you know go into more hormone therapies from that point you can navigate and and it's not you know it's not a linear absolute approach and and this is perhaps why we have been giving women one size fits all because because it's much easier for the doctor to say your cholesterol is high your blood pressure is high take this medication then hey you're gonna need

to eat different you're going to need to vary your fast you need to stop stressing repair your microbiome and detox most women are like what I have to do that right right it's a lot right a lot but it's where it's where Health exists I mean it's it's it's putting the responsibility back on us and and and and then the other part of that is all

of us I love this idea of women doing Health as a community because when when we are in community we're raising oxytocin and when you bring oxytocin up you bring cortisol down and when you bring cortisol down you regulate insulin and now you can regulate your your sex hormones so women are so good at connecting in community let's do it all in a community and learn

from each other and share our stories with each other love that I love that I think it's really important because I think what people feel isolated they feel on their own they feel like they just have to figure everything out you know and that they're not getting the answers they want from their doctor and I'm curious like why do you think it is that the medical

system is just so blind to hormonal regulation for women well I I think the first part is that we look for absolutes in in in our health care System you have this symptom I'm going to give you this diagnosis and I'll give you this pill or surgery so it's very linear like that I call that more of a patriarchal or masculine approach to health when we

look at a more feminine approach and I love this I actually heard um Sarah Blakely speak uh you know last year and she was saying that she one of her desires was to bring the a feminine approach to business and and you be able to integrate the masculine and The Feminine together in business and she believes that that was one of the reasons why Spanx was

such a a huge success I would say the same the same thing needs to happen with health care we need to bring the feminine back into health care and what that looks like is US understanding our own natural cycles and then not giving our power away to the doctor and just saying hey uh here's my symptoms tell me what to do but actually to start to

collaborate with our doctors and say tell me why this is showing up at this part of my cycle tell me what I can do that affects the the different aspects of my cycle and become educated and have an educated conversation with your doctor so I I really see an integration of the feminine the masculine together that's going to change this conversation within the doctor's room but

what's happening is within the doctor's room it's absolutes it's guilt it's shame it's one size fits all that has to stop and you know it's not their fault honestly because I never learned about anything in medical school and I I think one of the things I would love you to talk about a little bit is hormonal testing because I think we don't know how to manage

hormones through testing whether it's saliva testing you mentioned urine testing blood testing what's the best way to get a handle on hormones uh you know the Dutch test there's urinary estrogen metabolites there's blood work that you can do to look at hormone levels talk us through some of that yeah so if you're a cycling woman a blood test is not that helpful for you for you

I think that your door is more a Dutch test I'm a huge fan of the Dutch test in fact I I don't know what your feelings are on the Dutch test but I feel like if we could get a Dutch test into every woman's hands somewhere around in her 30s and her 40s you could she could really start to see if her her lifestyle was working

for her or against her and one of the reasons I love the urinary Dutch test over a blood test is that it can tell me the estrogen metabolites and the estrogen metabolites are how is your estrogen breaking down so you can go and get a blood test and your doctor might say oh my God your estrogen is so high you it's probably coming from toxic estrogen

maybe an estrogen an endocrine disruptor but when we look and compare that to a Dutch test which we've done a ton in my clinic we start to see well maybe maybe it's high because you've been eating really well and you actually have a lot of good of the good protective estrogen um you just and not as much of the bad estrogens so the Dutch just gives

us so much more than a than a blood test and that's a saliva test or is that it's a urine test yeah you it can be both you can saliva is really for adrenals um a lot tells us a lot more about adrenal function which is also important for hormonal Health yeah I mean it doesn't test so much that's all the cortisol hormones it tests the

sex hormones it gives you a really pretty good picture of where things are and it depends on where you do it in your cycle if you're premenopausal right yeah so that's the other thing is Dutch will have you do it somewhere between day 17 and day 21 so that we can see what progesterone is doing which is really really important you also get like DHA levels

you get you get a organic acids test with it now so you can see dopamine and norepinephrine these are things you just don't get on a blood test you're just getting a big broad picture whereas Dutch is giving you the details and and so what what exactly does the Dutch test look for that's different than you'd get on a regular panel of hormones that your doctor

would check like fshlh estrogen other estradiol progesterone testosterone how is it different and what why is it better the way the way functional so remember if we go back to this idea that hormones need your gut they need your liver they need the support of the other hormones so we can't when we just look at LH FSH and we we just give it a big broad

picture we're not really looking at the supporting actors let's put it this way if estrogen progesterone and testosterone were the stars we need to know what the adrenals are doing we need to know what the liver is doing we need to know what the thyroid is doing to affect that and that is what the Dutch gives you as opposed to a blood test it measures different

things too right not just it measures different kinds of sex hormones not just the ones we typically look at right yeah so it looks at major ones or estrogen progesterone and testosterone it looks at cortisol it also will tell you your cortisol pattern which is super cool because you can see if your if your pattern of when cortisol comes in is actually in regulation with what

it's the Circadian rhythm of the day what is actually supposed to happen I've we've we've read thousands of Dutch tests in my clinic and one of the biggest things we see is that that women will have high cortisol at eight o'clock at night and very low cortisol at when she wakes up in the morning and no wonder she can't sleep and she needs coffee to wake

up in the morning so it's really helpful for showing you that pattern and then it also will show you methylation Pathways so we can see like are you able to detox efficiently or is your body working really hard to detox or maybe it's been exhausting because it's been detoxing too much so I mean there I I could go on and on there's so many nuances in

the Dutch test that you just don't find anywhere else it's powerful and it's not easy to interpret there's a lot of numbers on there and the average doctor will have trouble so yeah do you use them do you have you are you familiar with that chest yeah yeah we use it in our practice for sure all the time and I find it very very helpful and

as an addition to sort of the overall picture but you know what's really quite encouraging for me and hearing you talk is how powerful a lifestyle is and how things that are within our control without even hormone therapy can can make such a difference and that there you know there are such simple ways through you know this basic five-step program that you've mapped out with passing

personalized nutrition Stress Management detox and lifestyle changes that can basically optimize Women's Health Men's Health too by the way and and basically slow the aging process I mean I love this I love this idea of of you know sort of personalization and customization it's Central to functional medicine I also love talking about how we can use fasting in different ways at different times for different results

uh we covered for example just basically time restricted eating as a way to optimize metabolism and hormone balance but also deep cleaning fast which are three to five or maybe longer fast uh i-72-hour fastest something I want to try again but I I get nervous because at 63 I don't want to lose too much muscle and so I I think that there's always that kind of

balance and I think uh we do we do need a a time to sort of give ourselves a rest from food and then we need to refeed as you said to optimize their metabolism yeah let me know when you go into 72 call me I'll coach you through it I'll make sure you do it successfully um but you know I I wanna I wanna really highlight

this idea around around lifestyle and I so appreciate um that that is so much of your message because I feel like we have lost the art of healthy living and we can say that it's causing all kinds of chronic disease problems but when we bring the hormone the conversation of hormones to the to the surface we can't we have to start with lifestyle otherwise you know

we've got women that are chasing down supplements that that are great I'm not I'm not opposed to them or we have women that are either so scared of hormone replacement or they're like it was the greatest thing of my life or we've got women that are taking thyroid medication and they're not seeing any results but they're doctors saying but your thyroid tests are completely normal it's

because we're missing lifestyle we have to come back to Lifestyle so thank you for saying that it's such an important piece and I don't know if you know this statistic but they're saying right now that the most common time for women to commit suicide is from 45 to 55. and what when I look at that statistic what I know is we have no understanding of our

hormones and you're dealing with a decade of women that are not understanding why they're depressed why they're anxious why they can't sleep and so when we we look at this hormonal literacy issue that we have going on when they're in these dark States they turn with that you know on on everybody else they turn on their husbands they turn on their Partners their friends they think

it's external and they don't realize there's so much they can do to adapt to these hormones that is how powerful lifestyle can be it's really true if you loved that last video You're Gonna Love the next one check it out here we dismiss symptoms that are I mean they're seemingly vague right fatigue I mean for me though my initial presentation was hyper hybrid and then I

fell hypo so I was kind of on this thyroid roller coaster and what I had was Hashimoto